The Survey for People Who Make Websites

It’s back, it’s improved, and it’s hungry for your data. It’s A List Apart’s second annual survey for people who make websites.

Last year nearly 33,000 of you took the survey, enabling us to begin figuring out what kinds of job titles, salaries, and work situations are common in our field.

This year’s survey corrects many of last year’s mistakes, with more detailed and numerous questions for freelance contractors and owners of (or partners in) small web businesses. There are also better international categories, and many other improvements recommended by those who took the survey last year.

Please take the survey and encourage your friends and colleagues who make websites to do likewise.

Customer support on the march

You know that new thing where you call customer support and a robot tells you that there’s no need to wait; just leave your phone number and you’ll be called back in three minutes? So you do it, and three minutes later, the robot calls you back and asks you to hold while your call is connected? And then you sit on hold for twenty minutes waiting to get connected?

AEA Boston 2008 session notes

Luke Wroblewski: “Jeffrey Zeldman’s Understanding Web Design talk at An Event Apart Boston 2008 highlighted factors that made it challenging to explain the value and perspective of Web designers but still managed to offer a way to describe the field.”

Luke Wroblewski: “At An Event Apart Boston 2008, Eric Meyer walked through common characteristics of several Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) frameworks and outlined lessons that can be learned from their structure.”

UX Zeitgeist (beta)

A colleague who is interested in learning more about user experience (UX) design, information architecture, and usability, asked what sites he should visit. I suggested he check the UX Zeitgeist (beta) section of Rosenfeld Media. Not only is it UX Zeitgeist interesting and informative in its own right; it’s also a reasonable who’s who, with an index of 120 UX people, sortable by mindshare, books authored, and other facets.